Mead yeast propagation

Thursday morning I am activating the "smack pack" for the yeast. If you click it, you'll see the details for the strain I'm using, and that its tolerance for alcohol will ferment up to 18%, under ideal conditions. Nice. One slight problem with that is that I will pretty much have to make the mead around 18% alcohol if I want any residual sweetness. Otherwise after I bottle it, it will continue to ferment any residual sugar, and if theres enough sugar the bottle will explode. Also, as i said, meads take a long time. Fermenting to 18% and then letting it clear up could possibly take a year or more.

I realized I only have five 4-liter fermenters, so I picked up my 6.5 gallon fermenter to make a sixth, larger batch. I also picked up some extra honey for this. So my plans are to make the 3 metheglyns in small fermenters (shooting for 12% alcohol), a mango melomel around 15% (some other fruit if I can not find mango at this time of year), a sack mead (as close to 18% as i can get it), and I will use the large fermenter to make 4 gallons of the sparkling mead at around 8% alcohol, and eventually keg it and serve it on draft. The sparkling mead is the only one I am pretty sure I will finish this summer. The others may take forever, I don't really know. At least they should all be done in time for my college graduation party in 2017.

I now have my yeast strain, and have finalized plans on how much mead I will make. Next I looked up pitching rates for meads, and couldn't find anythign about meads on the wyeast site, so I looked at recommendations for high gravity ales, and figured that I should definitely have at least 20 million cells per milliliter for such high gravity meads. The smack pack has 100 billion cells, and I am planning on making 9 gallons, so If I just pitched that much yeast, I would have about 3 million cells per milliliter. I have to use multi-step propagation technique. After several days, I will put the smack pack into 0.75 gallons of low gravity (1.040) mead, and let that ferment for a few days. Then I will pour that into about 2 more gallons of low gravity mead, and let that sit for a few days. I will be left with about 2.5-3 gallons of low gravity mead, and I will split this up between the 6 fermenters so that I about 20 million cells per milliliter. I didn't do all of this in my head. Theres a mead yeast propagation growth calculator on the wyeast site. Time to have a Green Flash West Coast IPA and recover from all that planning, driving to pick up supplies, and math.